Why Hans Zimmer Retired From The Superhero Genre

Well known music composer Hans Zimmer was out promoting his online master class in musical composing and he drop a bit of info on why he’s leaving the superhero genre behind. Hans Zimmer’s biggest superhero genre splash was in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy but when he was brought in to write a new Batman theme for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zimmer decided to bring in composer Junkie XL instead.

Zimmer gave his reason for wanting to leave the superhero genre in an interview with Inverse:

“I keep thinking about new styles of music and new ways of using technology, new ways of figuring out how to make everything that we do an experience for other people. And I just couldn’t do it anymore with the superhero movies, it’s as simple as that. If you take the three Chris Nolan Batmans, that’s three movies to you, but to you and Chris, it was 12 years of our lives. So sometimes you just have to say, ‘I don’t know where I’m heading, but I’m going to jump off this cliff.’ As soon as I said it, there were a lot of phone calls coming my way going, ‘Are you crazy?’ But I’ve never written music for money, money isn’t inspiring. And I didn’t want to get into it where it became a job. Ron Howard actually said something very smart to me. He said, ‘Don’t say you will never do a superhero movie again. Wait for somebody to turn up with an amazing script for a superhero movie.’ And I suppose that’s what I’m saying: Can I please have the amazing script? It just did my brain in to have written Christian Bale as Batman, and suddenly it’s Ben Affleck (in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). And it felt like I was betraying everything Christian had done. So there’s a certain amount of loyalty attached to those movies, as well.”

And of course, the interviewer had to ask about why Zimmer had decided not to work on a new Batman theme:

“I spent months trying to come up with something for Ben. The Batman that I know and the one I learned is the one that Christian did, and Ben plays it differently. And I can’t quite shake that off. For me, the Christian Bale character was always completely unresolved. It was always about that moment at the beginning of the first movie, where he sees his parents getting killed. It was basically arrested development. The Ben character is more middle-aged; he seems to be grumpy as hell, but I didn’t feel the pain that I felt in Christian’s performance. And it was that pain that made me interested.”

Ben Affleck’s Batman and the Justice League are set to hit theaters November 17 and will have Junkie XL doing the score. The Batman is still set to begin production sometime next year and Junkie XL might be brought in to compose that as well. We’ll keep you updated on everything DCEU and more on Screen Geek.

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Lifelong film fanatic, Mark Salcido was discovered frozen in carbonite by C.H.U.Ds. He was released to the surface level to spread his rants and opinions on anything of film and digital. Batman calls him for advice.